Luca Giustiniano

Demand Forecasting in the Fashion Industry: A Review

Forecasting demand is a crucial issue for driving efficient operations management plans. This is especially the case in the fashion industry, where demand uncertainty, lack of historical data and seasonal trends usually coexist. Many approaches to this issue have been proposed in the literature over the past few decades. In this paper, forecasting methods are compared with the aim of linking approaches to the market features.

Knowledge sharing in knowledge-intensive manufacturing firms. An empirical study of its enablers

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate, following previous studies on knowledge-sharing (KS) processes that consist of knowledge donating (KD) and knowledge collecting (KC), the relationship between KS processes and KS enablers to understand the effect of organizational, individual and technological factors. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on a Web survey. Data were collected from a sample of 759 knowledge workers selected from 23 knowledge-intensive manufacturing companies exposed to international markets and located in Tuscany (Italy). The analysis is based on multivariate regression models considering KD and KC as dependent variables. Findings – The results show that individual, organizational and technological factors matter to KS. Specifically, the paper reports that individual-level enablers and supportive leadership have a positive effect on both sub-processes of knowledge sharing. Further, the organic management system has a strong and positive impact on KD, while the efficacy o...

Revitalising the Outsourcing Discourse within the Boundaries of Firms Debate

Despite outsourcing has been at the core of managerial practice and literature for a long time, still authors do not agree on a clear understanding of the overall outsourcing process. This article answers two main questions, relevant to researchers and practitioners: 1.What are the main findings so far in outsourcing literature? 2. What do we still need to learn? Through a comprehensive review of the literature, we offer systematization of the existent body of knowledge on outsourcing, its implications on firms’ boundaries, and the theoretical challenges. In conclusion, implications for managers are drawn.

Activating social strategies: Face-to-face interaction in technology-mediated citizen science.

The use of crowds in research activities by public and private organizations is growing under different forms. Citizen science is a popular means of engaging the general public in research activities led by professional scientists. By involving a large number of amateur scientists, citizen science enables distributed data collection and analysis on a scale that would be otherwise difficult and costly to achieve. While advancements in information technology in the past few decades have fostered the growth of citizen science through online participation, several projects continue to fail due to limited participation. Such web-based projects may isolate the citizen scientists from the researchers. By adopting the perspective of social strategy, we investigate within a measure-manipulate-measure experiment if motivations to participate in a citizen science project can be positively influenced by a face-to-face interaction with the scientists leading the project. Such an interaction provides the participants with the possibility of asking questions on the spot and obtaining a detailed explanation of the citizen science project, its scientific merit, and environmental relevance. Social and cultural factors that moderate the effect brought about by face-to-face interactions on the motivations are also dissected and analyzed. Our findings provide an exploratory insight into a means for motivating crowds to participate in online environmental monitoring projects, also offering possible selection criteria of target audience.

Product Lifecycle Management as a Tool to Create Value in the Fashion System

The aim of this paper is to present the fashion system as a “cluster” and to evaluate the characteristics of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) taking into account various factors, in particular the different approaches to dealing with market needs. More specifically, the “ready-to-wear fashion” and “fast fashion” models will be presented and compared. The paper takes the Italian fashion system as the unit of analysis and assumes that consumer behavioural factors act in a non-predictable (i.e., random) way in the constantly changing social and cultural environment. Considering the internal complexity of a whole market system, a simplified system dynamics model is proposed.

Organizational trust in a networked world Analysis of the interplay between social factors and Information and Communication Technology

Purpose – Trust is a social factor at the foundations of human action. The pervasiveness of trust explains why it has been studied by a large variety of disciplines, and its complexity justifies the difficulties in reaching a shared understanding and definition. As for all the social factors, trust is continuously evolving as a result of the changes in social, economic and technological conditions. The internet and many other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions have changed organizational and social life. Such mutated scenarios challenged what researchers know about trust, thus several studies tried to investigate the difference between online and traditional (physical) environments. The purpose of this paper is to solve this multi‐dimensional puzzle by presenting a conceptual framework that will take into consideration the complexity of ICT mediated‐trust.Design/methodology/approach – The extant literature still lacks a homogeneous framework and presents a large amount of different...

Evolution of multiple organisational identities after an M&A event: A case study from Europe

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible coexistence of single and multiple organizational identities (OIs) after mergers and acquisitions (M&A). In particular, it describes how the sensemaking process leads the acquired and acquiring companies to maintain multiple identities, even after the formal conclusion of the integration process. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a grounded study based on a single case study (M&A between a German chemical multinational and an Italian/Swiss pharmaceutical firm). Findings – While many previous studies suggest that the evolution of OI reduces ambiguity by providing multiple identities under a shared commonality, this paper shows that multiple identities might survive within the same “new entity.” Research limitations/implications – Despite being based on a single case, the paper argues that the choice of maintaining multiple identities may be even more appropriate than the tendency to converge toward one of the old ones or toward a...

Psychosocial training: a case of self-efficacy improvement in an Italian school

Abstract The changes that the regulatory institutions have imposed on the Italian school system over the last decades may actually result in contradictory effects at the individual and organizational levels: resistance or indifference on the one hand and training or coping strategies on the other. The paper focuses on the impact of such changes on teachers, as professional workers within public schools and individual participants of change. The paper refers to psychosocial training as a coping strategy, analysing how school teachers deal with work-related stress, and what impact a training intervention might have on some individual dimensions. Subsequently, in the longitudinal study presented, we analysed whether the training intervention conducted was effective in terms of learning and change. The case under consideration is a primary school located in the South of Italy, and the participants in the training and research were 92 female teachers. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the designed and applied training programme, we measured how some important psychological dimensions have changed over time: self-efficacy, job satisfaction and interpersonal strain. According to a sociological learning approach, the results suggest the effectiveness of training programmes as enablers of change and solutions to some change paradoxes; when they respond to the identified needs, they are based on practical activities that require a collective participation, they focus on social relationships and processes and the knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. In the school context, the psychosocial training might represent a solution, if not a prevention strategy, for change management.

How knowledge collecting fosters organizational creativity

Purpose – Based on the interactionist perspective proposed by Woodman et al. (1993), this paper conceives organizational creativity as a complex concept whose investigation requires the understanding of the process, the product, the person, and the situation. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to enrich the understanding of how organizational creativity can be fostered by offering a framework which combines (inter-)individual-level learning (collecting knowledge from others), information sharing (through information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures), and contextual factors (perceived top management support). Design/methodology/approach – The empirical analysis draws on a sample of 362 employees from five subsidiaries of multinational corporations. The analysis is based on multivariate regression models considering organizational creativity as dependent variable. Findings – The paper shows that individuals’ orientation toward learning from others significantly enhances organization...

Mission impossible? The paradoxes of stretch goal setting

Stretch goal setting is a process involving multiple and nested paradoxes. The paradoxical side of stretch is attractive because it holds great promise yet dangerous because it triggers processes that are hard to control. Paradoxes are not readily managed by assuming a linear relation between the here and now and the intended future perfect. Before adopting stretch goal setting, managers should thus be prepared for the tensions and contradictions created by nested or interwoven paradoxes. Achieving stretch goals can be as difficult for the managers seeking to direct the process as for designated delegates. While the increasing popularity of stretch goal setting is understandable, its unexpected consequences must be taken into account. The inadequate use of stretch goals can jeopardize the social sustainability of organizations as well as their societal support systems.